Meaning in Verbs

Atkins and Levin discuss "the shake verbs," namely quake, quiver, shake, shiver, shudder, tremble, and vibrate. They acknowledge the difficulty in creating a coherent system to understand these verbs, yet attempt to systemize "some aspects" of the behavior of the "shake" verbs. By analyzing very similar words in a large lexicon, they can contrast the ways in which they are used and find the differences. Using theoretical linguistics, they attempt to explain the varying behavior of these similar "shake" words. They first dive into transitive differences between the verbs. I found it interesting that they are aware there can be no negative evidence, meaning it would seem me that a word always could be used in a new way and actually have a transitive use that just may not be written or spoken yet. Thus, categorizing based on written work is tough because something seems as though it could have a valid 'transitive' use that just is not yet being considered. The authors continue on an discuss dictionary differences, and how there members of the "shake" set have "no internal consistency of approach." Again, a dictionary can never be perfect and by definition, limits its vocabulary. Nonetheless, discoveries were made on superordinates and the context distributions of the verbs, specifically around usage for entire persons or not. This is curious that without any systematic rules, people somehow form rules around the correct subjects to use with verbs. Even though we can see sentences that are not actual English, that are jibberish, and can identify the noun and verb, we are actually thinking far beyond the structure of sentences to determine the verb based on the noun. The Haspelmath paper continues in this same direction, discussing the differences between similar words, though in this case the varying forms of the word: live. They contrast the lexeme and word-form of live. It does seem very peculiar the linguistics base theory on how the dictionary treats morphological relationships: throughout linguistics, I am confused how much of language is an active human decision of where verbs can be used and how they are used, and how much could come from a "UG" that Chomsky describes. There seems to be so many exceptions and alternate cases that a unified theory is impossible, even in very simple verbs. As we derive "readable" from "read" naturally, and "google" becomes a company and a verb, I wonder how much of this is a rule verse learned behavior. Slobin dives into this complexity as well in constructing a sentence, in how a complex physical event is "inferred" from simple clauses to create a narrative. These differences between languages, for example, Spanish, further complicate in my mind how much of this could be from a "UG" and learned behavior.